‘High Windows’, the title poem of Philip Larkin’s fourth and final major poetry collection, is one of his most famous. The poem examines the new permissive society that flowered during the 1960s. Before proceeding to our analysis of ‘High Windows’, you can remind yourself of this poem (or discover it for the first time – a real treat) here.

Completed in February 1967, ‘High Windows’ was one of several poems which Larkin wrote around this time – during the so-called Summer of Love – which analyse the poet’s own middle-aged attitudes to the younger generation and the changing attitudes to sex. ‘Annus Mirabilis’ was written just a few months later, and ‘Sad Steps’, completed the following April, might also be partnered with ‘High Windows’ in this regard.

Have recently started attaching images that most closely mirror the image in my mind my crudely constructed lines are trying to express, I would like to see see your own efforts and comments if you feel it’s working for me

It is said that seeing is believing. But what if those things we’re seeing are obscured somehow? Can we trust our eyes? Or do we require an inner knowing, a new perspective to override our senses?

The image above is my attempt to take something prosaic and make a new form of it. Would you believe that hidden beneath the vivid colours are some faded sweetpea flowers, a wire fence and a recycling bin? Yes, really.

We’re all artists at heart, creatives to the core. Because how could we not be when our Creator God made us that way, to reflect His ability to take, shape, mould and make something from nothing?

Though sometimes we don’t consider ourselves as such. But with the right type of media that suits us, a hefty dose of courage, encouragement, faith, patience, persistence and perseverance we can all discover just how to be our…

Matters close to the heart. Memories of childhood visits to the library rank highly in our, as we age, list of fondly-recalled thoughts. From the meanest small town library to the grandest major city edifice we should do all we can to preserve these National Treasures, the local library.

…by any stretch of the measurement of age, this ol’ Scots Jurassic scribbler is no longer a youth… I adulted around a-hem years ago… and having become in recent years an Author, I have more than a passing interest in the comparatively new debate as to whether books are better in print or on an eReader such as Auntie Amazon’s Kindle… and despite being part of the, (a-hem again), ‘older’generation, I have no negativity toward the modern downloaded reader versions of books… don’t mistake me – I still enjoy immensely the feel of a paper book in my hands, and even, yes, the smell of the paper and the gum paste thats binds the spine (emb’dy else remember ‘sniffing’ a new book?)… but times move on – the electronic age has become an imbedded part of our lives whether we embrace it or not –…

The plot of Sophocles’ great tragedy Oedipus the King (sometimes known as Oedipus Rex or Oedipus Tyrannos) has long been admired. In his Poetics, Aristotle held it up as the exemplary Greek tragedy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it one of the three perfect plots in all of literature (the other two being Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones). Oedipus the King might also be called the first detective story in Western literature. Yet how well do we know Sophocles’ play? And what does a closer analysis of its plot features and themes reveal?

‘Toads’, Philip Larkin’s celebrated analysis of the realities of everyday workaday drudgery versus a life of freedom and unemployment, appeared in his 1955 collection The Less Deceived. In 1962, he was inspired to return to the same subject – and the same metaphor – for a follow-up poem, ‘Toads Revisited’, which we’re going to subject to a bit of Interesting Literature-style close reading in this post. You can read ‘Toads Revisited’ here.

Larkin once observed that ‘Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth’, and the title of Larkin’s poem subtly echoes, but also parodies, such Wordsworthian titles as ‘Yarrow Revisited’. ‘Toads Revisited’ carries a somewhat less glamorous edge: indeed, the toad was seized upon by the poet Marianne Moore as a metaphor for the ugliness that good poetry needs to contain. ‘Imaginary gardens with real toads in them’ was…